Green Curry

Preparation time: 20 minutes
Cooking time: 15 minutes
Serves 2 people

Ingredients:
• 30 grams green curry paste
• Vegetable oil
• 1 kaffir lime leaf
• 200 grams coconut milk
• 150 grams of meat (chicken, beef, pork or shelled prawns)
• 10 grams palm sugar
• Fish sauce
• 2 crisp eggplants
• 15-20 leaves of sweet basil
• ½ a red chili

Directions
Heat up a saucepan, then put the green curry paste in it with just enough vegetable oil to fry the paste.

Stir the curry paste for a few minutes then add the kaffir lime leaf and about half the coconut milk. Stir it, then bring it to the boil.

Add the meat, the palm sugar and the rest of the coconut milk, and stir it for a few minutes until the meat is cooked, before adding the eggplants, sweet basil and chili. At this point, taste it to see if it needs a few drops of fish sauce or not. Your curry is now ready to serve. Bon appetit!

Tips from the chef

1. Since the green curry paste already has plenty of flavour, do taste it before deciding whether to add fish sauce. Chef Phudon usually adds a few drops of fish sauce right at the end of cooking, but this will depend on your preference.
2. You can make your curry greener and more aromatic as follows: Put 50 grams of coconut milk, a sprig of coriander and 10 grams of sweet basil in a blender and blend well. When the curry is cooked, add this mixture to it and stir gently.
3. If you can’t find fresh kaffir lime leaf you can use dried ones. You will need 10 dry leaves for every fresh one. Before using them, put the leaves in water for 10 minutes, then dry them for a few minutes until you can smell the aroma from them.

Meet the chef

For the past seven years Chef Phudon Prachum has been executive chef, in charge of six kitchens, at the Cape Panwa Hotel in Phuket. Before that he worked as a chef in many countries, including Iran, Saudi Arabia, Cyprus and Japan. Here, he talks with Phuket.Com about his life as a chef.

When did you start cooking?
When I was about 10. I am the eldest child in my family so, if my parents were not around, I had to cook for my little sisters and brothers.

When did you make cooking your career?
When I was about 20 I started as a kitchen cleaner in a hotel in Bangkok. My boss must have seen some potential in me, because after two years I got a chance to be a cook’s assistant. That was more than 30 years ago.

What is the best part of being a chef?
I like to try new things. At our hotel, every time we have a cocktail party, I try to create something new. I may invent a new dish, or I may do a dish that I know but then play with how it looks or how it is presented.

You cook all kinds of cuisines – Thai, Asian, Western. What is your favorite dish of all to eat?
I like many dishes but the one that sticks in my mind was a lamb kebab that I had when working in Saudi Arabia. I can’t recall the name of it, but it was made from lamb. The meat was not from just any type of sheep, either. It was from a mountain sheep.

What are your priorities at work?
For me hygiene must come first. It is more important than how the food looks or how it tastes.

If you weren’t a chef, what other career would you choose?
I can’t imagine doing anything else. I’ve been doing this for a long time, yet I still love it.